Traditional solutions allowing the transport of multicast traffic between multi-protocol label switching/virtual private networks in a public network for virtual private networks necessitates the use of an external routing device with one or more physical links to each of the interconnected multi-protocol label switched/virtual private networks. Drawbacks of this solution are the cost of the external routing device and the multicast forwarding limitations, particularly capacity, imposed by the information transport capacity of the physical links. This shortcoming of limited information transport capacity limits the practical size (e.g. number of locations, number of users) that may be included in a virtual-private network. Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.